“Crumb’s work explores and attempts to reconstruct the cultural life of Genesis as a literary, historical, and spiritual work on its own terms….The original audiences for these tales had an understanding and shared context that we have lost. Crumb subjected the text to a rigorously close reading and made a solid attempt to visualize the largely conjectural cultural setting (laying out his methods, which I haven’t heard anyone challenge, in the introduction.) His adaptation must be regarded as an experiment, in painting a full picture from a collection of hints, and such totality cannot have the exactness of scholarship.” That’s the most significant contribution I made.
And they claim to be honoring the word of God, and that the Bible is a sacred text… the most significant thing is actually illustrating everything that’s in there. “…went back and checked against the text and it’s not in there. This pertains to the quotation which you provide from Crumb in which he states that he: More likely, you find this journey of discovery exceptionally fruitful, while I for the most part do not, if only because I have already experienced it. But I doubt if this is the real area of disagreement between us. The “detective work” which Crumb engages in has been done many times over and with far greater ability. The “remoteness” of this text, which is well hidden by many modern translations, is precisely what scholarship brings forth and elucidates. The best commentaries provide the context which you lament as being lost to modern readers: historical setting, social mores, linguistic complexities and turns of phrase.
Just as scholarship enriches the experience of any dense literary text, so too does it refine our understanding of the Bible and Genesis.
There is, for instance, the flawed understanding that the “tendency of modern biblical scholarship to pull apart narrative threads has been disintegrative to the religious sense of the Bible as a unified, divinely inspired whole.” I’m afraid that quite the opposite is the case and no person (of a serious intent) who has read a good commentary would tell you otherwise.
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